O2 says its IPTV efforts have been such a roaring success in the Czech Republic that it'll roll out a similar offering in the UK 2008.
The bubbly comms outfit, which has entered the UK broadband market this year, has attracted 70,000 Czech telly subscribers since September 2006, which isn't bad considering a population of just …

COMMENTS

Call me a Be fanboi if you want, but

I have to take issue with "And a creaky old infrastructure that's asked to deliver ever-more data without significant upgrades in the last mile.". I've got Be broadband and I get 13Mbps pretty much whenever I want it. I download the entire internet every day, and Be don't take me to task for it. In my experience Be are the best ISP I've been with, for the lowest price I've ever paid for broadband.

@ alex dekker

TV or not TV, that is the question...

Just when are people supposed to watch TV on their phone anyway ? I can't think of anyone who would watch telly on a mobile at home - you certainly can't do it whilst driving, nor can most people do it whilst at work - or any other activity come to think of it, other than sitting on the bus or train

And is anybody really going to pay through the nose just to watch Jeremy Kyle on the 28 Bus to town (and also watch their phone battery drain away) ?

Re:Downloading the Internet...

oh dear

As a mobile phone operator I like O2, I really do, been with them since BT cellnet days, but it would be nice if they concentrated more on making a better phone signal that bothering with rubbish like IPTV.

"Inaction"

@alex re Be

Be are in early days, still in customer acquisition mode. They have a few tens of thousands of customers total across the limited number of exchanges where they operate. The current result of this is (I guess) that they aren't running their (expensive) backhaul to their core network at anywhere near capacity. If they ever get lots more customers they'll have two options. They'll either have to install lots more bandwidth to their exchanges to maintain current "unlimited" behaviour. That'll cost lots of $$$, which may or may not be matched by the $$$ from extra punters - usually not. Or they'll have to manage usage so it fits sensibly in existing installed bandwidth. The same rules of arithmetic and economics apply to Be as applies to every other ISP in the UK, and no "consumer" ISP offers a sustainable "unlimited" and un-traffic-managed package at an affordable price.

So download the Internet while stocks last. If you find anything worth keeping, can I have a copy if I send you a USB stick?

Where's the other Alex these days, the "IPtv expert" who used to do regular IPtv columns on ElReg?

Re: Anonymous Coward

Sure, that argument holds when you have one choice of supplier for data transit (like any ISP that operates over BT lines), especially when (like BT do) they charge an obscene amount for bandwidth.

ISPs like Plus.net are required to pay an order of magnitude higher costs for the bandwidth used by their customers, where as Be have their own 'nationwide' (London, Cardiff, Birmingham..) network, connecting up the various MANs, which have multiple gigabit connections. All their traffic then peers through LINX, typically through Deutsche Telecom or Level 3.

All of which is a HELL of a lot cheaper than paying BT £3/GB. If your bandwidth doesn't cost much, you don't really mind how much of it your customers use. Bulldog managed to provide this sort of service for a long while, until Cable & Wireless got bored of running a consumer ISP,

A nice 'killer app' would be IPTV providing various sky channels - sky sports without any sky bumpf, or without the ridiculously expensive and difficult to provide Sky HD (try getting Sky HD in a flat prewired for Sky SD)